Hybrid Cloud Operations Lead

Sword is a leading provider of business technology solutions within the Energy, Public and Finance Sectors, driving real transformation change within our clients. We use proven technology, specialist teams and domain expertise to build solid technical foundations across platforms, data and business applications. We have a passion for using technology to solve business problems, working in partnership with our clients to help in achieving their goals.

Sword is looking for an experienced Hybrid Cloud Operations Lead to lead our Infrastructure and Cloud Platforms technical discipline within Technical Operations.

You’ll directly manage Infrastructure Engineers and Cloud Platform Engineers working across Managed Services and Co-Managed Services. Your remit will cover traditional infrastructure, hybrid cloud, public cloud, virtualisation and associated platform services, including VMware and Nutanix.

This is a people leadership and operational delivery role. You won’t be expected to act as the deepest technical authority across every platform. Principal Engineers will define the technical standards, patterns and controls. Your job is to make sure the team understands them, has the capability to apply them and follows through consistently within live customer services.

What you’ll be responsible for

You’ll lead the day-to-day operation and development of the Infrastructure and Cloud Platforms discipline, creating clear ownership, visible priorities and consistent follow-through across multiple customer environments.

Your responsibilities will include:

• Leading Infrastructure Engineers and Cloud Platform Engineers across Managed Services and Co-Managed Services.
• Translating standards defined by Principal Engineers into clear expectations and consistent team behavior.
• Managing individual and team performance through regular 1:1s, objectives, personal development plans, appraisals, coaching and clear action tracking.
• Maintaining an accurate skills and training matrix, identifying capability gaps and turning them into training, mentoring or recruitment actions.
• Coordinating workload, service coverage, priorities and escalation across infrastructure and cloud platform services.
• Making sure operational commitments covering patching, maintenance, backup, capacity, lifecycle and vulnerability remediation are owned, tracked and progressed.
• Supporting the onboarding and transition of new customers and services into live support.
• Confirming that engineers have the required knowledge, access, monitoring, runbooks and escalation paths before accepting operational responsibility.
• Using service data, incident trends, problem records, observability insight and customer feedback to identify delivery risks and improvement priorities.
• Identifying work that sits outside agreed service scope and escalating it through the appropriate operational or commercial route.
• Working closely with Principal Engineers, Service Delivery, Architecture, Cyber, Automation, Commercial teams and customer stakeholders.

Requirements

• Proven experience leading infrastructure, cloud platform or technical operations teams within Managed Services or Co-Managed Services environments.
• Strong working knowledge of hybrid cloud, public cloud and virtualisation technologies, including VMware and Nutanix.
• Good understanding of operational disciplines across compute, storage, networking, backup, monitoring, availability, capacity, lifecycle and resilience.
• Ability to turn technical standards defined by Principal Engineers, architects or other technical authorities into consistent operational delivery.
• Direct people-management experience covering 1:1s, objective setting, appraisals, coaching, performance management and career development.
• Experience assessing team capability, maintaining skills and training matrices, and converting identified gaps into practical development plans.
• Strong knowledge of service-management practices, including incident, problem, change, request, capacity, service transition and continual improvement.
• Ability to coordinate patching, maintenance, backup assurance, vulnerability remediation, lifecycle and capacity activities across multiple customer environments.
• Experience using observability, service-health data, incident trends and customer feedback to identify operational risks and improvement priorities.
• Commercial and operational awareness covering workload planning, customer onboarding, scope control, contract commitments, service boundaries and operational risk.

Benefits

At Sword, our core values and culture are based on caring about our people, investing in training and career development and building inclusive teams where we are all encouraged to contribute to achieve success.

We offer comprehensive benefits designed to support your professional development and enhance your overall quality of life. In addition to a Competitive Salary, here's what you can expect as part of our benefits package:

Personalised Career Development: We create a development plan customised to your goals and aspirations, with a range of learning and development opportunities within a culture that encourages growth.

Flexible working: Flexible work arrangements to support your work-life balance. We can’t promise to always be able to meet every request, however are keen to discuss your individual preferences to make it work where we can.

A Fantastic Benefits Package: This includes generous annual leave allowance, enhanced family friendly benefits, pension scheme, access to private health, well-being, and insurance schemes, an employee assistance programme, discounted cash plan and more…..

At Sword we are dedicated to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace and are proud to be an equal opportunities employer, ensuring that all applicants receive fair and equal consideration for employment, regardless of whether they meet every requirement. If you don’t tick all the boxes but feel you have some of the relevant skills and experience we’re looking for, please do consider applying and highlight your transferable skills and experience. We embrace diversity in all its forms, valuing individuals regardless of age, disability, gender identity or reassignment, marital or civil partner status, pregnancy or maternity status, race, colour, nationality, ethnic or national origin, religion or belief, sex or sexual orientation. Your perspective and potential are important to us.

If we can do anything to help make the hiring process more accessible, please let our talent acquisition team know when you apply so we can support any adjustments.